安达信咨询方法与工具资料库ADVENT.DOCVIP

DIALOG(R)File 15:ABI/INFORM(R) (c) 1996 UMI. All rts. reserv. 97-35372 Your next excellent? adventure Garner, Rochelle Computerworld v29n37 PP: 89-92 Sep 11, 1995 ISSN: 0010-4841 JRNL CODE: COW AVAILABILITY: Fulltext online. Photocopy available from ABI/INFORM 6206.00 WORD COUNT: 1415 TEXT: Connie Deletis isnt just mandating change at National Semiconductor Corp.s information systems organization; hes inflicting transformation on a massive scale. Six months into the mutation process, Deletis has stripped out layers of management, forced employees to reapply for their jobs and realigned staff into teams. But not just any teams. Hes instituting those teams as centers of excellence. The concept goes by many monikers--competency center, shared resource center, high-performance environment. Whatever the name, these centers organize people by their technical expertise and have a common focus. But just how excellent these centers are depends on a constant commitment to training. In this radically redefined organization, top technical skills for employees and soft skills for supervisors are absolutely critical for success. And be warned: Most corporations will be unable to carry this off because of the natural parochialism in an organization, says Joseph Cleveland, who, as president of enterprise IS at Lockheed Martin Corp. in Orlando, Fla., has embarked with his company on the troubling centers of excellence waters. Managers have to give up responsibility for something thats vital to them. Beyond that, centers of excellence are as varied in how they manage people and projects as the organizations that implement them. Thats because companies are making this up as they go along. So why the attraction to this model? Centers can sometimes be the only way to manage a flat organization, says Tom Shipley, vice president of Gartner Group, Inc.s Management of Information Te